The Sufi Teaching Story and Doris Lessing

Abstract

It is easier to say what the Sufi teaching story is not than to say precisely what it is-just as it is impossible to say precisely what Sufism itself is.1 As one commentator warns, the reader is not taken into the realm of Zen paradox, which is orderly in comparison: It would be truer to say that he is going into a messy rooming house, where people specialize in forgetting and remembering, snooping and tattling, looking askance and stealing from closets. It is not a realm in which it is wise to seek, still less to pretend to, too much accuracy.... come from everywhere, including man's dimmest and darkest past, now Past Thousand Years. come from wordplay and proverbs, from fairy tales, tall tales, Greek plays, Hindu epics, Tibetan jokes, infancy gospels, the Desert Fathers, and even common sense. At any rate there they are: the Magic Mirror, the Fountain of Life, the Insane Uncle, the head of the World, and Snow White-the belly laughs of the bazaar and the anguished fictions of bedeviled monks. They are full of wonders and strange ideas.2 The Sufi teaching story consistently parts company with many other traditional tales. Whereas the ordinary expectations from a story of the oral tradition are (1) entertainment and (2) a moral answer or solution of some sort, the Sufi teaching story has as its function neither of these. Sometimes it does have a barbed, gallows sort of humor, but a moralistic solution is never the point. On the contrary, the Sufi teaching story is open-ended, depending on individual members of the audience for a variety of interpretations. Unlike most stories, the Sufi story becomes a means, rather than an end; significantly, these stories are intended to change the form of the thinking process itself. According to Idries Shah, who is the most important spokesman for contemporary Sufism,